New Retina MacBook Air performance beats out the 12-inch MacBook

In the days immediately following its unveiling at Apple’s iPad Pro event, the new Apple MacBook Air model has split opinion.

It finally introduces a long-awaited Retina display to the range, adds Touch ID and is made with 100% recycled aluminium. However, it’s somewhat derivative of the more portable 12-inch MacBook, it has a keyboard loads of people hate, and bumps the price of the cheapest MacBook by £250 – likely pricing many people out of a MacBook purchase.

However, one area unlikely to cause much debate is the performance. The company has added 8th-gen Intel Core ‘i’ processors, which deliver big time compared to comparable models in Apple’s recent MacBook range.

Newly published Geekbench scores from 9to5Mac show the 1.6GHz dual-core i5 MacBook Air 2018 notched up ~4200 in single-core testing and ~7800 in multi-core testing.

Compared to the 2017 MacBook Air, that’s a boost of 27% and 28% faster in single- and multi-core scores. Meanwhile, its 20% (single-core) and 17% (multi-core) faster than the 12-inch Retina Macbook, despite being £50/$100 cheaper.

Of course, the laptop is blown out of the water bay the 2018 13-inch MacBook Pro according to the report, which scored 16,464 in multi-core testing.

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Just yesterday we brought similar word of performance scores for the new iPad Pro versus Apple’s 15-inch MacBook Pro laptops. Turns out the new A12X processor sitting inside Apple’s most powerful tablet ever is far more competitive with the laptop than anyone probably envisioned.

Of course there are more things to consider here than just the performance of the processor in benchmarking tests. The MacBook Pro has way more RAM, a larger display and an attached physical keyboard. While no direct comparison has taken place yet, we can safely assume the MacBook Pro enjoys superior graphical performance. But still…

Are you planning a MacBook Air purchase? Or did this release fail to push the envelope far enough? Drop us a line @TrustedReviews on Twitter.